Mr. Flip-Flop

To make the connection between 1 Kings and 2 Kings, I would like you to turn to the last chapter of 1 Kings, verse 51. I will read the last three verses, which introduced us to the reign of Ahaziah.

1 Kings 22, reading from verse 51:

Ahaziah the son of Ahab became king over Israel in Samaria in the seventeenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and reigned two years over Israel. He did evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of his father and in the way of his mother and in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who had made Israel sin. For he served Baal and worshiped him, and provoked the Lord God of Israel to anger, according to all that his father had done.

Now 2 Kings chapter 1.

Moab rebelled against Israel after the death of Ahab. Now Ahaziah fell through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria, and was injured. So he sent messengers and said to them, ‘Go, inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, whether I shall recover from this injury.’

But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, ‘Arise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria, and say to them, “Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going to inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron?” Now therefore, thus says the Lord, “You shall not come down from the bed to which you have gone up, but you shall surely die.”’”

So Elijah departed.

And when the messengers returned to him, he said to them, “Why have you come back?”

So they said to him, “A man came up to meet us, and said to us, ‘Go, return to the king who sent you, and say to him, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are sending to inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron? Therefore you shall not come down from the bed to which you have gone up, but you shall surely die.’”’”

Then he said to them, “What kind of man was it who came up to meet you and told you these words?”

So they answered him, “A hairy man wearing a leather belt around his waist.”

And he said, “It is Elijah the Tishbite.”

Then the king sent to him a captain of fifty with his fifty men. So he went up to him, and there he was, sitting on the top of the hill. And he spoke to him, “Man of God, the king has said, ‘Come down.’”

So Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, “If I am a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men.” And fire came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty.

Then he sent to him another captain of fifty with his fifty men. And he answered and said to him, “Man of God, thus has the king said, ‘Come down quickly.’”

So Elijah answered and said to him, “If I am a man of God, let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men.” And the fire of God came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty.

Again he sent a third captain of fifty with his fifty men. And the third captain of fifty went up, and came and fell on his knees before Elijah, and pleaded with him, and said to him, “Man of God, please let my life and the life of these fifty servants of yours be precious in your sight. Look, fire has come down from heaven and burned up the first two captains of fifties with their fifties. But now let my life be precious in your sight.”

And the angel of the Lord said to Elijah, “Go down with him. Do not be afraid of him.” So he arose and went down with him to the king.

Then he said to him, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Because you have sent messengers to inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, is it because there is no God in Israel to inquire of His word? Therefore you shall not come down from the bed to which you have gone up, but you shall surely die.’”

So Ahaziah died according to the word of the Lord which Elijah had spoken, because he had no son. Jehoram became king in his place, in the second year of Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah.

Now the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?

Allow me to introduce you to a man whom I am calling Mr. Flip-Flop.

I suppose all of us, during the course of our years on earth, have more than our share of flip-flops. We get up one morning and we are all happy and pussy-footed and upbeat and starry-eyed, and everything looks beautiful to us. And the next day or the next week we get up and we are depressed and discouraged and everything looks bad. We get up one day and we are full of energy and we dive into things that we have been leaving for some other time, and we are amazed at how much we get done. And the next day or the next week we get up and even our normal everyday activities get left by the wayside. We quit.

And I suppose it is inevitable throughout life. And some flip-flops are good. In fact some flip-flops are very necessary. But it is bad if the flip is as bad as the flop, or if the flop is worse than the flip. And that, I am afraid, is the case of Mr. Flip-Flop whom we have just finished reading about.

Of course, as you already know, I am talking about King Ahaziah.

But now let us admit, as the last three verses of 1 Kings remind us, that Ahaziah did not come into this world with what I would call an outstanding genetic inheritance. His father was the notorious King Ahab, and his mother was the even more notorious Queen Jezebel. And this is the son of Ahab and Jezebel, and we are not too surprised to discover that he lives up to their very negative reputation.

But one of the things that is very interesting here is that it is said of Ahaziah something that I do not think is said of any of the other kings of Israel and Judah. It is said that he walked in the way of his father and he walked in the way of his mother. I do not think any other king in Israel or Judah is described in that way, because there is a sense in which the evil that manifested itself in Ahaziah had equal inputs from both father and mother.

From birth he had been influenced, not to mention Jeroboam who was the first king of Israel and had that bad influence himself. So Ahaziah comes into the world without what we would call the spiritual advantages of a genuinely Christian home.

But on the other hand, let us not forget that Ahaziah lived in a time of immense and enormous privilege. He lived in a time when God was manifesting himself through mighty prophets. God was speaking through prophets large and small, but very especially through the greatest prophets that have ever lived in Israel, Elijah and Elisha. And of course during the reign of Ahab it was the ministry of Elijah.

So even though he was born into this kind of a family with this kind of influence from his parents, outside of the family there would be the influence of the prophetic word of God, the influence of the prophet Elijah.

And does it strike you that that is somewhat similar to our situation in America today? Lots and lots of kids are born into homes now where there is virtually no Christian influence, or where the Christian influence is very minimal. And that is a disadvantage, I submit that. But we live in a country where there is a high availability of the Word of God. It is easy to find a Bible, do you not agree? It is easy to find people who read the Bible and who preach the Bible. Not all of them are orthodox, I grant you. But nevertheless this is the country where the prophetic word of God, the informed Scriptures, is available to us widely.

And so it seems to me at least that Ahaziah, like every child born into a home like this, has a choice, does he not? He has a choice between walking in the way of his father and mother and walking in the way of the Word of God.

Now the reign of Ahaziah is described for us in the first chapter of 2 Kings as a time of trouble and tragedy. And the first thing that we are told here is that after the death of Ahab there was a rebellion on the part of the king of Moab, whose name, we need to remember, was Mesha.

Now we need to remember that in terms of economic and military and political success, you may recall that the description that was executed by the Moabite stone easily refers to Ahab as one of the major military figures in the great Middle Eastern panoramic of that hour. And the last picture that we have of Ahab in chapter 21 is there is a man who has an extreme amount of self-confidence. He is ready to go to war with Syria, quite confident that he can win the battle.

So Ahab had risen to military prominence, and apparently he had extended his rule on the eastern side of the Jordan River. But now that the man is dead, Mesha decides this is an opportune time to rebel.

Now we do not know exactly why Mesha did this. He may have thought that Ahaziah was not half the man that his father was militarily speaking. And if that is what he thought, he was probably right. He may also have thought that Ahaziah had his hands full gaining control of the kingdom for a while, and that this was a good time to rebel.

What Mesha could not possibly have counted on was that his rebellion against the kingdom of Israel was favored by a personal tragedy that happened to Ahaziah.

So we begin with what might be called a political tragedy, a rebellion by the land of Moab. And we proceed to a personal tragedy. And we are told here that Ahaziah fell through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria.

Now we are not exactly sure of what happened here, but let me give you the scenario that future scholars have suggested that is probably pretty close to what actually did happen. Remember that in the ancient Middle East, flat rooftops were customary. No air conditioning, folks. It was customary to go out on the rooftop at night and get the benefits of the cool night breeze. And apparently Ahaziah had a chamber, and there was a skylight to this chamber, we would suggest. And it was covered with latticework.

I am assuming now Ahaziah is up there on the roof, and he is working on the roof, as was his custom. And he accidentally steps on the skylight, which he was not supposed to do. Maybe, or if he steps on it, he discovers that the wood is rotten. It does not hold him. In any case, what apparently happened was that he fell through the skylight, through this latticework in the roof of his upper room, and he is seriously injured.

It is not possible to call 911 at this point. Even in those days there was no medical science as we know it. And so Ahaziah suffered a very serious injury. And it has been written, whether it was the injury itself or perhaps an infection arising from the injury, it appears as if his life is threatened.

Now I can kind of appreciate the skylight problem now, because in the new apartment into which I have moved I have my first skylight ever, believe it or not. It is over the kitchen, and you can look up a shaft there. And it is about the size of a piece of glass up there. And this story reminds me that if I am in the kitchen and that glass were to land on my kitchen floor, and if they are not injured they can cook supper, of course. But other than that, I can appreciate the possibility of this kind of accident happening. And probably the upper chamber of Ahaziah was very large, and Ahaziah’s life is threatened as a result of that.

Now please remember that you are in the kingdom of Israel, and the national God of Israel, the Lord, is the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, parted the Red Sea, brought them food. Where is the God who is speaking to Israel? And so would it not be natural, if you want to get spiritual advice about your physical condition, do you not think it would be natural for Ahaziah to say, “Let me send somebody, one of the prophets of God, most desirably let me send somebody to Elijah. Let him tell me whether I am going to get well”?

Instead, what does Ahaziah do? He sends messengers to Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron. Now this is one of the manifestations of Baal, of course. As we know, Jezebel introduced Baal into the nation of Israel, and visual worship of Baal was under the tolerant permission of Ahab. And this is apparently a particular form of the god Baal down in the Philistine city of Ekron.

And so Ahaziah, in his hour of need, turns not to God or to His word, but to the world of Baal-Zebub.

Now why is he doing this? Why is he doing this? Well, if you have been watching very closely throughout the study of Kings, you may discover that it appears to have been part of the superstition of the ancient world that when you were sick, if you could get the representative of the deity to tell you that you would get well, you would then get well.

You remember Jeroboam sending his wife in disguise to Ahijah the Shilonite, because Jeroboam said, hoping that if she would not recognize him, his wife, that he would give a good prophecy rather than a bad one. Later on we find Naaman the Syrian doing the same thing, getting a message from the king of Syria, and the messenger brings a present to Elisha, “Would you look on the king of Syria? Get well.” And so I think that what Ahaziah is doing is he is looking for a god whose representative will say, “I am going to get well.”

And the history of his family and the God of Israel is definitely not encouraging here. As a matter of fact, his father had died by ignoring the warning of a prophet of God who said, “If you go into that battle, you will not come back.”

So I think frankly that Ahaziah is trying to bypass and ignore the word of God and open to get a favorable word out of a pagan god. It suggests the level of this superstition and his ally in ignoring the Word of God.

They say, as rain, “I would never send to a pagan god with my information.” Wherever that we turn to, whatever we are most deeply believing in, and some people when they are very sick turn to the Virgin Mary, or they turn to the saints, or they try to occur under our current data or something like that. That we easily bypass the real source of power that we need.

But fundamentally, when Ahaziah, and I am not sure I am not different than me, folks, you are perfectly capable of ignoring the Word of God. One of the very positive benefits that I think has happened to this church in the last couple of years is that we have had a leader who has been insisting that we read our Bible. But for a lot of Christians, or for no one at this table but for a lot of Christians, it is perfectly easy to go a whole week without even opening your Bible. And it is easy to go for several weeks at a time without even hearing a message on the Word of God. To a very large extent it is possible that the Word of God is out of our experience.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water.

No matter what our reason for doing so, no matter how deep or how shallow our sense of need may be, to ignore the Word of God is a very serious death. And one of the best measures of our relationship to God is the Word of God in my life. Do we feel that a day is incomplete if I have not really considered the Word, have not read it, have not thought about it at all? Ignore God’s Word.

That is the flip side of Mr. Flip-Flop. In his hour of crisis he did not, you know, “Don’t bring me the Word of God. Don’t get Elijah with me. Something from Baal-Zebub, that is what I really want.”

But they survey, and as the messengers are on their way to Baal-Zebub, who do they meet? Elijah the Tishbite. And he says to the messengers, “Go back and tell the king the reason I want to know is, is there a God in Israel?” And the Lord says, “You will not come down from the bed on which you have gone up, but you will surely die.”

So they go back to Ahaziah with this very unwelcome news.

Now the first thing I just want to say is that nobody, across nobody but nobody, ever succeeds over a long period of time in avoiding the Word of God. If God is intending to confront you, He will, in His own time and way, and not necessarily in the way you are thinking.

I remember an interesting incident which reminds me, I guess, of the way in which the Word of God is not always welcomed. The individual who is part of the story is not known to any of you. He is a friend I had over in North Dallas, and I considered him a very good friend, a nice fella. But I recently had the story. I had been talking to him about the Word. He was not a saved man, and I had been sharing the gospel with him. And I went to his house one day, and his wife, Pat, they let me in the boarding. I said, “Have a living room.” And she said, he gave his name, she says, “He is in the baby.” So I said, “Okay.” I went to the finish. I sat down in the living room, and his wife, who was equal then, sat down with me. And we talked and we talked and we talked and we talked. I thought to myself, “It is one of the longest in the history of mankind.” So I gave him and I said the gracious goodbye to it. Why I walked away, and I have always thought since then that when he did emerge from the bathroom he was probably the cleanest man in Texas.

But I, the only reason I figured I was there, giving more of the Word of God. And question, by passage and leave it alone. But when God is ready to confront us, He will confront us.

So they go back to Ahaziah and give him the message. And he says, “What kind of a man was this?” They said, “Well, he was a hairy man. He had a leather belt around him.” Ahaziah is not to be an idiot, right? Are you ready for this? The other one of God never split. Now comes law. He had a thing to do with the message in the night job, right?

But now he says to a captain of a rubber squadron of fifty men, “They will get him. Bring him down here.” So the captain of fifty men goes up. There is Elijah on the side of a mountain. And he calls up to him, “Man of God, the king says, ‘Come down.’” And I am sure this squadron leader never expected what he was going to get.

Elijah said, “If I am a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven and devour you and your fifty men.” Now the word reaches Ahaziah, not from any of the fifty, but of course understand when word gets back to him about this. And guess what he does? He says, “Sorry, I am getting another fifty up there.” They did. And the second captain of fifty comes and he finds Elijah in the same place. Notice now it says, “The king says, ‘Come down quickly.’” Let us get more emphatic about it. “Come down quickly, old man of God.”

And Elijah says, “If I am a man of God, then let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men.” So word gets back to him. And what does he say? “I give up. If I keep doing this I will not ever honor that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Nothing. Captain. And it took him and crawl, getting what in the world is going on.

Well, remember that he ignored the Word. And he that Jezebel bring him Baal, which the whole nine yards, and he would not, you know, the finger to oppose it. So he moved the Word of God. And when Ahaziah is ignoring the Word of God in the first part of this story, he is adopting his father’s way. It was not just about way at all. She resisted the Word of God. She panicked. She thought it. She killed those prophets. Remember that poor Obadiah had to hide a hundred prophets. And then after an idea is instrumental in the execution of the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal. You remember what Jezebel said? “Who does not say I lost it? I get off. I surrender.” Who sent them a message? Who says, “The gods do so and more to me also if I do not make you like one of them by tomorrow at this time”? We are dead meat. Run or we go. Remember, it runs for his life.

So the way of his mother was not ignoring the Word of God. It was fighting the Word of God. That is the flip side of them.

What did Ahaziah have hoped to gain by this? Well, you understand that Elijah has given him a negative response. “You are going to die.” So utilizing the theory that you can scare a prophet. After all, his mother had succeeded in scaring Elijah one time. “I will get him arrested and when I bring him in here let him give me that prophecy to my face. And let him worry about whether I am going to execute him for making the prophecy or something like that.”

Please remember that the mentality of Middle Eastern people was magical. They believed in lots of gods and lots of supernatural power. And I do not think for a minute that Ahaziah authoritatively was drawing upon the limitless and inexhaustible power of the living God when he calls down fire from heaven. I think he thought that what Elijah was doing was, you know, using a spell. He has some kind of key to the power of the God he serves, and he can say a spell and boom, power comes down. You say another spell, fire comes down.

And I think the behavior of Ahaziah argues that he thought that Elijah would run out of spells before he ran out of soldiers. I mean, you do not deliver the senators to vote on the empathy and to suicide, do you? It looks to me as if he really has put the God of Elijah and the word of Elijah on a par with any other magical thing that he might happen to believe in, including whatever it was he was looking for from Baal-Zebub.

And because he has a low esteem for the Word of God and the uniqueness of the God of the Word, he resists Him.

That is now. I do not need to tell you, do I, Dad? There are really three alternatives when we face the Scripture. One is to ignore them. Another is the kind of words that bite them, try to change their meaning or try to get that light of how the meaning does not quite fit what we think. Another only option between do these two things, the submission to the Word of God and obedience to the Word of God.

Does it not seem to you that this third captain of fifty is the only smart man in the story on Israel’s side as they of the narrative? Notice what he does. He comes from the same mountain the other two men had come to, and he does not call up to Elijah. He walks up to Elijah. He goes up the mountain himself. And then he falls down at the feet of Elijah, and he says, “I know that the power of God works through you, and that you, that my life and the life of my fifty men is yours to take or not. So I am just asking for mercy. Well, please give me mercy.”

And the angel of the Lord says to Elijah, “You do not need to worry about this man. Go with him.”

So Ahaziah finally gets his prophet brought to him, but they are not exactly under arrest, will you agree? If anything, Elijah has an honor guard now. And I do not think that after fifty cents of anything happened to him even in the presence of the king. But those Ahaziah get out of all this trouble the same message repeated again.

His book, thus says the Lord, verse 16, “Because you have sent messengers to inquire of Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, is it because there is no God in Israel to inquire of His word? This is new to inquire of His word. Therefore you shall not come down from the bed to which you have gone up, but you shall surely die.”

If I read these words correctly, folks, I do not know about you, but when I hear a story like that it makes me feel fairly shallow in terms of my devotion to the Word of God. But we can learn something from that. Not only is it true that we are not to go over the Word of God, certainly true that we are not to fight it, not to flip-flop between those two extremes with a moment. And the only way to make it a real part of our life is to incorporate it into our daily program.

“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the way of sinners, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night.” And our faithfulness and effectiveness is going to depend on the Word that the Word of God has for us.

So in the end, and I am sure you have already made your resolutions by this time, maybe even broken a few, that maybe this is a good time to reaffirm in the privacy of our hearts before God the enormous and indispensable importance of the Word of God to each and every one of us.

I understand that our reading program is there one out in August, but the purpose of the reading program is just to get us into a lifelong habit, right? So that you take the advice of the psalmist and say that he wants God to teach him to love His Word. Let us make it a part of our life more than ever in 2001.

And I will be glad to take questions or your comments on it.